Saturday, September 10, 2011

April

I have a good friend from Wildwood named April. Before she worked at camp, she spent a couple of years living in Honduras, in a small town a couple hours south of San Pedro Sula called Copan. She also taught at a bilingual school and lived with a host family. She was one of the first people I went to when I first heard God's calling on my life to go to Honduras, because I knew she would be able to help, and she was actually the first to suggest working at a school as a good source of income.

She was down for just a couple of weeks, visiting her host family in Copan, and wanted to come see me last night before she flew back to the states. So, we were able to hang out for a few hours, and I told her everything that I'd been feeling, with language struggles and wanting to just give up. She told me that she'd felt the same way after two weeks, and she had taken more semesters of Spanish than I had, as well as having visited several Spanish-speaking countries.

She told me that as long as I knew that God had me here, I'd be fine. Struggles were normal. It took her 5-6 months to become good enough with Spanish to communicate, and another 6 months to really get good at it. Although it was a little discouraging that it's probably going to take longer than I'd thought, it was also encouraging to know that she struggled, but is bilingual now. Now, I'm prepared to put in the work it's going to take to learn the language, and I know that it's going to pay off eventually. Practice makes perfect. Or, as April told me "poco de poco." (little by little)